Here’s a fascinating look at a Japanese magazine from 1938-1944. I can’t read Japanese, but looking through the issues shows lots of heroic photo, stories of sacrifice, and no actual suffering.
Our pickaxes will shred the enemy’s ships
Eyes front! The Battle of Leyte Gulf
Basic bayonet exercises
Determined to kill the barbarians Army Special Strike Force
Oil for victory Boosting the production of pine root oil
Positive and courageous
Final battle to secure our supplies
Italians are also fighting as hard as they can
Digging up with all their strength Steadfast students of the pilot training prep school work the mines
Caring for vegetable fields in winter Protect wheat and vegetables
Too bad they don’t have the 1945 issues cataloged.
“There is little doubt that Japanese government agencies, military and civilian alike, realized by mid-summer 1945 that their country could not win the war. Japan’s cities were being destroyed almost at will. Although attempting to avoid the Emperor’s palace, the Allies had devastated the capital in only six hours of bombing on 9-10 March 1945, leaving 100,000 dead and over 1,000,000 homeless, an even worse toll than from the later atomic bombing of Hiroshima.”
Why the confusion? I said right away that the Japanese people were more or less experiencing the same side effects of war as the Germans. Do you think I also believe the Germans weren’t being heavily bombed???
(Ditto argument for others making similar “objections” to my comment.)
That includes bombings, food problems, depletion of the young male population, etc.
If they heard anything at all about, for example, battles in the Philippines, this didn’t have the same mental affect as news about battles in Belgium or Poland had on the Germans. The Japanese people viewed their home islands as very difficult to attack, esp. given their invincible navy. So the US was throwing bodies into a clever meat grinder in the Philippines? Yay, Japan.
But for the Germans, the events of the summer of '44 made it clear it was only a matter of time before Germany would be invaded. The faint hopes of a turnaround were being crushed.
I think this post for the most part explains why your original statement about the Japanese public not knowing things were going to hell by 1945 is wrong. Unlike Germany, Japan was virtually immune from bombing until the B-29 campaign from the Mariana’s really got going*. Therefore this development, following the loss of the Marianas which Japanese elites recognized at the time in mid 1944 as very ominous, became palpable evidence of impending disaster to the public by 1945. It was obvious by then things had taken a huge turn for the worse, just like the German public realized it when Allied and Soviet armies reached their borders in late summer 1944.
The fact that Germany was bombed almost all along does not change the fact that the B-29 offensive (and simultaneous effective completion of the blockade by subs in particular but also a/c including the B-29 mining effort) was a new major piece of evidence the Japanese public did not have to rely on media to report, and by which everybody in Japan by summer '45 knew the war was going very badly.
*there had been the very minor Doolittle raid in April 1942, raids on outlying areas not really the Home Islands like the Kuriles from 1943, then relative pinprick raids on the Home Islands by B-29’s based in China from mid 1944, but when the Marianas B-29’s started in November 1944 and really got going in 1945, then carrier planes and eventually USAAF tactical a/c from Iwo Jima and Okinawa appeared in large numbers over Japan, it was obvious things were going to hell, along with the less directly visible but by then obvious effects of the blockade.
The Canadian government had plan for spinning the Dieppe disaster before the raid took place–valuable lessons learned, that sort of thing. The valuable lessons included things like, “don’t launch a frontal attack on a heavily defended enemy,” which they might have picked up from Sun Tzu instead.
Someone on this bvoard recently linked to German newsreels about the D-Day. Even though they showed how efficient the German soldiers were at killing GIs, destroying allied tanks, defending positions, etc…especially in the second part, I was surprised by how documentary-like this thing looked, especially in the first part. I then watched several of these newsreels. Once again, being propaganda, they always presented successful actions by the German army, navy, etc… but they made you clearly aware of the general situation. So, if you ignored the parts showing ennemy bodies and wrecks, etc…which presumably most people were able to do, you’d have a rather good idea of what was going on…
I in fact specifically tried to find one corresponding to the surrender of Von Paulus army, but couldn’t. It was a weekly newsreel, and not all weeks were available, so I can’t tell whether I just couldn’t find it or it just wasn’t covered at all. Even assuming the latter (which is likely), the German viewer would still notice that the frontline had significantly changed, even if he was kept in ignorance that a German army group had surrendered.
So my overall feeling was that the news Germans were seeing were much more informative than I would have assumed. Basically, they were of the kind “look how good our soldiers are at defending the beaches against the massive ennemy invasion, look how good our soldiers are at destroying tanks in Normandy countryside, look how good our soldiers are at counter-attacking on the Rhine”, etc…
?? He’d been a leading figure and Minister of Propaganda for years: but granted, this was stepping up a notch to set a new strategic tone and message, after years of trumpeting seemingly endless victories.
Not initially, and they misled them for quite a while. Eventually the truth did come out.
Interestingly, the Emperor himself suggested issuing an Imperial Rescript to the commanders, but his advisers convinced him not to.
Midway was the point where the Japanese military started to blatantly lie to the public. However, this was no longer possible by 1944 and they stopped it.
This is incorrect. They did not believe that things were going well and knew that they were losing. Defeatism was a major problem for the government.
From what I’ve read and then in discussions with people who lived through it, the shock was that it was actually happening. Not that it wasn’t going to happen, but that they had suffered so much for so long that it was finally ending.
I know during the Battle of Stalingrad, around Christmas 1942, the Germans faked a recording of soldiers allegedly at the front there singing Christmas Carols (you know, to show how they totally weren’t freezing to death and getting shot to pieces by the Russians) as part of a “Christmas Greetings” radio programme broadcast in Germany that year.
As far as Germany is concerned, I’m reading a fascinating recent book by Nicholas Stargardt, “The German War”, which delves into the interplay between how the leadership was handling public messages, news and public opinion, and how ordinary people thought and felt about it, as indicated both in official security reports and in surviving private letters and diaries.
Throughout the war, there was a great deal of official massaging of news, and control over lines to take, and often outright lies until it was too late to conceal major unpleasant truths, like the fall of Stalingrad. But Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry put a lot of work into managing the public line: first it was all about heroic stands against the Jewish Bolshevik hordes and the miraculous air supply bridge (which of course was anything but), then reports became very low-key and neutral, as though nothing much was happening, and when the fall had to be announced, the line was all about a new heroic Thermopylae. But the unprepared public’s reactions of shock, dismay and outright disenchantment with the leadership led Goebbels to use the reality of defeat as a means to frighten people into the “total war” ideology - that they had to stick with the leadership or the Communists would do to the Germans what Germans had (however euphemistically referred to) done to the Jews and the Russians. And then, as dealing with the bombing and working harder for the war effort took everyone’s time and energy and the war moved elsewhere, Stalingrad was just not discussed again.
While streaming “Five Came Back” about the cinematic efforts of directors Capra, Wyler, Ford, Stevens, and Huston while in the military, I took notes and have been tracking down the films.
The Battle of Midway, a 1942 short by Ford was propaganda of the rankest sort. While no doubt heartfelt (Ford and his navy crew were on the island under falling bombs and strafing aircraft) it had such gems as (showing army B-17s landing and a crew posing by the nose):
Jane Darwell: Why that’s young Will Kenny. He’s from my hometown - Springfield, Ohio. He’s not going to fly that great big bomber?
Donald Crisp: Why yes, ma’am. That’s his job. He’s a skipper.
Three dead Americans at Buna Beach is famously the first still photo showing GI corpses; it was published in Life magazine, September 20, 1943 and the editors had been campaigning the censors for months for permission to show it. The text accompanying photo:
*
Here lie three Americans.
What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a noble sight? Shall we say that this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country?
Or shall we say that this is too horrible to look at?
Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?
Those are not the reasons.
The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .
The reason we print it now is that, last week, President Roosevelt and *[Director of the Office of War Information]* Elmer Davis and the War Department decided that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.*
We were not above coloring the news during the conflict.
After Midway, even some of the Japanese military commanders didn’t know about it being a defeat. Like the Army – when their troopships were turned around and sent back to port, the message from the Japanese Navy was that ‘the occupation of Midway has been postponed’. It’s unclear if even the Emperor was told about this defeat.
Of course, it should have been possible for any ranking military official to figure out that it was a serious defeat and the beginning of the end. One American carrier sunk vs. 4 Japanese carriers. (And the American one was the same one that had been claimed as sunk in the previous naval battle.) But the Japanese military, like people everywhere, are pretty good at either fooling themselves or just refusing to think about bad news.
I was going to say something similar. My grandmother, who had 4 brothers in the war and who herself worked on the Manhattan Project, saved a stack of newspapers and Life Magazines from the war and I ended up with them. I haven’t read them in a long time but I remember them being pretty honest, talking in general about what was happening, talking about casualties and including quotes from soldiers about what they’d been through.
I just glanced at one, it was following a tough battle and talks about how the town the battle took place in was destroyed. One soldier is quoted as saying “What happened here shouldn’t happen to any town, except a German one!”